COVID-19 Data Dispatch

Tag: K-12 schools

  • Sources and updates, July 16

    • Real-time detection of coronavirus in the air: A new study, published this week in Nature Communications, describes a tool to detect airborne SARS-CoV-2 particles. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis developed this tool; it works by collecting aerosols in a container and screening them for chemical properties matching the coronavirus spike protein. In the researcher’s proof-of-concept study, the detector tool was able to detect coronavirus particles with 77% to 83% accuracy, and could detect the virus when it was present at relatively small volumes. If the tool holds up to further tests, it could be valuable for monitoring healthcare settings and other public places.
    • Routine respiratory virus testing at K-12 schools: Another study about testing, published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report: researchers in Kansas City, Missouri regularly tested students and staff members at the public school district for SARS-CoV-2, the flu, RSV, and several other common respiratory viruses. About 900 participants opted into monthly testing for the 2022-23 school year, for a total of 3,200 tests conducted. Overall, about one in four tests were positive for at least one respiratory virus. Pre-K students had the highest positivity rate (40%), while rhinovirus/enterovirus was most commonly detected. The study shows how many viruses are going around in school settings, as well as the potential value of testing for reducing spread.
    • Predicting COVID-19 activity with Google searches: COVID-19 data commentators have long suspected that online trends indicating people were losing their sense of smell or taste in large numbers could predict an upcoming surge. (Remember the Yankee Candle Index?) Well, a new study in the CDC’s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal provides some evidence for this pattern. Researchers at Yale and Columbia Universities compared Google search trends for “loss of smell” and “loss of taste” to COVID-19 hospitalization and death numbers in five countries. They found a strong correlation between these searches and COVID-19 increases for major COVID-19 waves. So, even as official data become less available, online trends may still be a good indicator.
    • Estimating infection rates from mortality data: COVID-19 mortality data can be used to work backward and estimate true infection rates, according to a new paper in Science by researchers at the University of California Davis and the University of the Basque Country (in Spain). The scientists used a machine learning model to analyze death reports from several European countries, essentially predicting infection rates in reverse. Their analysis found that lockdowns and mask requirements, among other COVID-19 safety measures, had a major impact on transmission, one of the authors said in a press release. Mortality data continues to present a useful tool for tracking COVID-19’s full impact.
    • Long COVID cohort study suggests full recovery may be rare: One more notable new study, shared by The Lancet as a preprint: researchers at a hospital in Barcelona shared the results of a study following Long COVID patients for two years. The study followed 548 people, including 341 with Long COVID and 207 who did not have long-term symptoms after acute COVID-19. Only 26 (7.6%) of the Long COVID patients recovered during the two-year follow-up period, according to symptom surveys and diagnostic testing. Hannah Davis, a patient-researcher at the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, shared additional highlights and takeaways from the study in a Twitter thread.
    • New bill to strengthen wastewater surveillance: Finally, a bit of hopeful news: three U.S. senators just introduced a bipartisan bill that would strengthen the CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS). The bill would specifically expand NWSS to include surveillance for other public health threats, and would enable it to provide more funding to state and local health agencies. Cory Booker from New Jersey, Angus King from Maine, and Mitt Romney from Utah are the three sponsors. I’m not a political reporter, so I won’t pretend to know how likely this bill’s chances are of passing, but I hope it’s a step toward making the U.S.’s wastewater surveillance infrastructure permanent.

    Editor’s note, July 23, 2023: An earlier version of this post misstated the virus most commonly detected in the Kansas City schools study. (It was rhinovirus/enterovirus, not RSV.)

  • Sources and updates, April 9

    • Second Omicron boosters for high-risk adults: The FDA and CDC are planning to authorize a second round of bivalent, Omicron-specific vaccines for high-risk adults, the Washington Post reported this week. This decision will apply to Americans over age 65 and those who have compromised immune systems, with these groups becoming eligible four months after their initial bivalent boosters. It’s unclear exactly when the decision will become official; the FDA and CDC will make authorizations sometime “in the next few weeks,” according to WaPo.
    • HHS announces (underwhelming) Long COVID progress: This week marks one year since Biden issued a presidential memo kicking off a “whole-of-government response” to Long COVID. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) commemorated the occasion with a fact sheet sharing the federal government’s progress so far. Unfortunately, that progress has been fairly minor, mostly consisting of reports and guidance that largely summarize existing government programs or build on existing systems (such as Veterans Affairs hospitals). Many of the Long COVID programs that Biden previously proposed have not received funding from Congress; meanwhile, the National Institutes of Health’s RECOVER initiative, the one program that has been funded, has faced a lot of criticism.
    • RECOVER PIs recommend action on treatment: Speaking of RECOVER: this week, a group of scientists leading research hubs within the national study called for federal funding that would support treatment. The principal investigators (PIs) of these hubs have developed expertise in Long COVID through recruiting and studying patients, leading them to identify gaps in available medical care for long-haulers. To respond, the PIs recommend that Congress allocate $37.5 million to support Long COVID medical care at the RECOVER research sites. Their proposed budget includes patient outreach, telehealth support, educating healthcare workers on Long COVID, and more.
    • Ventilation improvements in K-12 schools: The CDC released a new study this week in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, sharing results of a survey (conducted last fall) including about 8,400 school districts representing 62% of public school students in the U.S. Research company MCH Strategic Data asked the districts about how they’d improved ventilation in their school buildings, along with other COVID-19 safety measures. About half of the districts reported “maintaining continuous airflow in classrooms,” one-third reported HVAC improvements, 28% reported using HEPA filters, and 8% reported using UV disinfectants. The results indicate that many districts have a long way to go in upgrading their indoor air quality.
    • Flu vs. COVID-19 mortality risk: Ziyad Al-Aly and his colleagues at the VA healthcare system in St. Louis have published another paper analyzing COVID-19 through the VA’s electronic health records. This study, published in JAMA Network, describes the mortality risk of COVID-19 compared to seasonal flu for patients hospitalized during the 2022-2023 winter season. The researchers evaluated about 9,000 COVID-19 patients and 2,400 flu patients, finding that risk of death for COVID-19 patients in the 30 days following hospitalization was about 1.6 times as high as the risk of death for flu patients. Despite great advances in vaccines and treatments, COVID-19 remains more dangerous than other seasonal viruses, the study suggests.
    • Biobot launches mpox dashboard: This week, leading wastewater surveillance company Biobot Analytics launched a new dashboard displaying its mpox (formerly monkeypox) monitoring. Biobot tests for mpox at hundreds of sewage sites across the U.S., largely through its partnership with the CDC, and will continue this monitoring through at least summer 2023. The new dashboard shows mpox detections nationally over time and monitoring sites by state; it also includes some information on how mpox surveillance differs from COVID-19 surveillance.

    All featured sources

  • Sources and updates, March 12

    • COVID-19 polling data from Axios/Ipsos: During the workshop I led at NICAR last weekend, one attendee (who works at the market research company Ipsos) recommended that journalists and researchers interested in Long COVID data should check out the Axios/Ipsos polling project to track American attitudes on COVID-19. Recent iterations of the poll have included questions about Long COVID, and the polling results are broken out by demographics (age, race, houeshold income). The surveys ask many other COVID-19 questions as well, such as attitudes about masking. To access the data, you can download PDFs from the Ipsos site or spreadsheets from Roper.
    • CDC provides guidance for Long COVID deaths: The CDC National Center for Health Statistics has started to add information about Long COVID to its guidance for death certificates, following a report that the agency published in December about deaths from Long COVID. The guidance now explains that SARS-CoV-2 “can have lasting effects on nearly every organ and organ system of the body weeks, months, and potentially years after infection,” and can contribute to premature death months or years after a patient’s original infection. For context, see MuckRock’s report on Long COVID deaths from December.
    • Long COVID gastrointestinal symptoms: Ziyad Al-Aly and his team at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System have a new paper in Nature about long-term gastrointestinal symptoms following COVID-19. Using the VA electronic health records database, the researchers compared 150,000 people who’d had COVID-19 to millions of controls. They found people with COVID-19 had elevated risks of many gastrointestinal disorders (including acid-related illness, intestinal disorders, pancreatitis, and more) in the year following their acute cases, compared to the controls. GI symptoms have long been an under-publicized aspect of COVID-19 and Long COVID.
    • Clinical trial for Long COVID shows promising results: And one more Long COVID study: researchers at the University of Minnesota examined the potential for three common medications to lower risk of Long COVID. This study was a blinded, randomized control trial—the gold standard of medical research. One of the drugs tested, metformin (which is a common medication for type 2 diabetes), led to a significantly lower risk of Long COVID compared to the placebo. The study hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, but it shows promising results for metformin as a potential Long COVID treatment option.
    • Examining trust in public health agencies: Another new paper, published this week in Health Affairs, shares results from a survey of about 4,200 U.S. adults (a nationally representative sample) about trust in public health agencies. The survey suggested that trust in federal agencies is connected to perceptions of scientific expertise, while trust in state and local agencies is more tied to “perceptions of hard work, compassionate policy, and direct services.” Survey respondents who reported the least trust in public health cied concerns about political influence, private sector influence, inconsistency, and excessive restrictions.
    • Some parents lied about children’s COVID-19 status: One more notable survey study, published this week in JAMA Network Open: researchers at Middlesex Community College (in Connecticut) and University of Utah Health, among other collaborators, surveyed a group of 1,700 U.S. parents about COVID-19 protective measures for their children. The study found about 26% of respondents reported lying about or misrepresenting their child’s COVID-19 status in order to break quarantine rules. Common motivations for this behavior were wanting to “exercise personal freedom as a parent,” not being able to miss work or other responsibilities, and wanting kids to have normal experiences. The results suggest “a serious public health challenge” for continued COVID-19 outbreaks and other infectious diseases, the paper’s authors write.
    • Maternal mortality during the pandemic: MuckRock (where I work part-time) has published new analysis showing a significant increase in maternal deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on CDC mortality data. The death rate for women ages 15 to 44 went from about 29 deaths per 100,000 births in 2019 to 46 deaths per 100,000 births in 2021. Death rates were significantly higher for Black women and in states with more restrictive policies on maternal healthcare. You can find the full analysis (including a selection of state-level data) here.

    All featured sources
  • Wastewater surveillance can get more specific than entire sewersheds

    Wastewater surveillance can get more specific than entire sewersheds

    The first page from a comic about wastewater surveillance in K-12 schools, developed for UC San Diego’s SASEA program

    This week, I had a new article published in The Atlantic about how COVID-19 wastewater surveillance can be useful beyond entire sewersheds, the setting where this testing usually takes place. Sewershed testing is great for broad trends about large populations (like, an entire city or county), the story explains. But if you’re a public health official seeking truly actionable data to inform policies, it’s helpful to get more specific.

    My story focuses on one wastewater testing setting that’s been in the news a lot lately: airplane bathrooms, from which researchers can identify new variants arriving with international travelers. But airplanes are far from the only place where specific wastewater surveillance can be valuable. Here are some of those other places, highlighting some information that I learned in reporting this story (but couldn’t fit in the final article).

    K-12 schools

    Early in the pandemic, colleges and universities became a hub for wastewater surveillance innovation. At campuses like Columbia University in NYC, researchers tested the sewage at individual dorms in order to determine exactly which students were getting sick—and take quick action, usually by requiring students at the infected dorm to get PCR-tested and quarantining the people who tested positive.

    But the same technique can apply to schools with younger students. In late 2020, the University of California San Diego expanded its testing program to elementary schools, in an initiative called the Safer at School Early Alert System. The program started with 10 schools in the 2020-21 school year, then expanded to 26 in the 2021-22 year. Wastewater testing at specific sewershed points next to the schools led researchers to identify asymptomatic COVID-19 cases with high accuracy, program leader Rebecca Fielding-Miller told me.

    The San Diego program isn’t alone: other public school systems have tried out building-level wastewater testing, usually in collaboration with nearby research groups. While the research projects tend to successfully show that wastewater surveillance can pick up infections, it’s challenging for school systems to get the funding to do these programs long-term. (Unlike universities, which are in total control of their funding, public schools need to rely on local governments).

    As a consequence of these funding challenges, the San Diego program wasn’t renewed for the 2022-23 school year. “We really would have wanted to keep doing it, but funding ran out,” Fielding-Miller said.

    Hospitals, other healthcare facilities

    Much of the U.S.’s health strategy throughout the pandemic has focused on keeping hospitals from becoming overwhelmed—or at least helping hospitals weather COVID-19 surges. Wastewater surveillance can help accomplish this, by giving hospital administrators warnings about potential increased transmission; wastewater trends usually predict hospitalization trends by a week or more. And when wastewater surveillance is happening at hospitals themselves, these warnings can be really specific.

    At NYC Health + Hospitals, the city’s public hospital system, administrators can get these warnings from wastewater testing at the system’s eleven hospitals. The surveillance program includes weekly tests for COVID-19, flu, and mpox (formerly called monkeypox), in collaboration with local researchers. The resulting data “gives us better situational awareness,” said Leopolda Silvera, a global health administrator at Health + Hospitals. If the health system notices a coming surge at one hospital, they can adjust resources accordingly—such as sending more staff to the emergency department.

    The Health + Hospitals wastewater program has been running for about a year, Silvera said. At this point, it’s the only program she knows of that does building-level surveillance at hospitals. In the future, the hospital system might start testing for other pathogens and health threats like antimicrobial resistance.

    Congregate facilities

    Congregate facilities like nursing homes and senior living facilities can include a lot of vulnerable people who are at higher risk for severe COVID-19, all living in close quarters. As a result, this is another category of settings where it could be helpful to have building-level wastewater surveillance: facility administrators could learn quickly about upcoming surges and respond, by doing widespread PCR testing or instituting a temporary mask mandate.

    The state of Maryland used to have a program doing exactly this, with a focus on correctional facilities throughout the state—particularly facilities housing the most vulnerable residents. The wastewater surveillance program ran through May 2022, at which point it “quietly ended,” according to local outlet the Maryland Daily Record. An initial $1 million in funding for wastewater testing in Maryland ran out; while the CDC National Wastewater Surveillance System picked up testing at wastewater treatment plants, no new entity was able to continue testing at the congregate living facilities.

    According to the Daily Record, the building-level wastewater testing was incredibly helpful for informing COVID-19 measures at correctional facilities and helped keep cases down. I hope the Maryland program isn’t the last example we see of this testing in the U.S.

    Large, communal workplaces

    Early in the pandemic, some of the U.S.’s worst COVID-19 outbreaks happened at factories, particularly large food processing plants. People in these settings are often working in close quarters, easily able to infect each other—and when an outbreak happens, there are ramifications for both individual employees and the company’s business.

    These large facilities could be another target for wastewater surveillance: if company administrators see a warning about rising COVID-19 from their buildings’ sewage, they could institute basic public health measures to curb the spread. Such is the strategy for some mine companies in rural Canada, which work with biotech company LuminUltra to test their wastewater. People often live and work at these sites, making them relatively closed settings for transmission.

    At these locations, COVID-19 was previously “kind-of out of control, clinical testing was very reactive,” said Jordan Schmidt, director of product applications at LuminUltra. With wastewater testing, the mining companies can keep outbreaks “to a handful of people.” Fewer people get sick and there’s less interruption to business, he said.

    Neighborhood-level testing

    As public health agencies face lower budgets and overall lower awareness about COVID-19, some officials want to maximize their limited resources. If you only have the funding and staff for two mobile PCR testing sites this week, you’d want to make sure they go to a neighborhood where the testing would be most helpful, right?

    The Boston Public Health Commission had this goal in mind when they launched a new neighborhood-level wastewater testing program, in collaboration with Biobot Analytics. The program includes testing twice a week at 11 sites across Boston, selected to provide good coverage of the city and also enable testing without too much disruption to traffic. While testing just started in January, the program is already helpful for identifying specific COVID-19 patterns, said Kathryn Hall, deputy commissioner for the health agency.

    Boston’s program is focused on COVID-19 right now, but could expand to other diseases as needed, Hall said: “Now that we have the infrastructure in place, it allows us to be really be prepared and also to ask novel and interesting questions.”

    Airplanes

    Airplane surveillance fits into a slightly different category than the other settings I described here. When researchers test airplane wastewater, they aren’t seeking to get advanced warnings of new surges or inform public health policies. Instead, the goal is to track variants—with a focus on any new coronavirus mutations that might come into the U.S. from abroad. (Read the Atlantic story for more details on how this works!)

    Other transportation hubs could be useful for tracking variants too, experts told me. This could mean large train stations, bus stations, shipping ports—any location that involves a lot of people moving from one place to another. After all, variants can evolve in the U.S. as easily as they can in other parts of the world.

    Overall, the specific wastewater testing settings described here could be valuable pieces of expanding the U.S.’s overall surveillance network, along with the more-traditional sewershed testing. But all these testing sites need sustained funding to actually provide valuable data in the long run, something that could be in jeopardy as the federal public health emergency ends.

    More wastewater surveillance

  • Callout: No, NYC, those schools aren’t in Colombia

    Callout: No, NYC, those schools aren’t in Colombia

    These schools are not in the right location. Screenshot from the NYC DOE COVID-19 case map.

    For several days now, the New York City Department of Education’s COVID-19 case map has had a significant error: on this dashboard, a number of schools are erroneously located in Colombia. Like, the South American country.

    The error appears to be a problem with the dashboard’s geographical tagging, putting these schools in another continent instead of their correct NYC neighborhoods. But it’s a pretty big issue for parents and school staff who might be checking the map, looking for COVID-19 cases at their schools.

    If these users didn’t know to zoom out and then scroll down a fair amount—which they probably wouldn’t, unless they got very creative or followed the right people on Twitter—they would think there were no cases. Which is far from the truth.

    Shout-out to NYC schools data experts Mary Ann Blau and Sarah Allen for flagging this issue!

    more source spotlights

  • Sources and updates, September 11

    • White House plans for annual boosters: This week, Biden administration officials announced a plan for one COVID-19 shot each year, on a similar timeline to the flu shots distributed every fall. In this plan, this fall’s Omicron-specific boosters are the first iteration of annual boosters. Some scientists are skeptical about the plan, given that (as I discussed last week) we have very little data on how well the new boosters work. It could be preemptive to say just one shot each year will be enough, and the federal government should also be investing in next-generation vaccines that might better prevent infection and transmission.
    • Urgency of Equity Toolkit: The People’s CDC, a health advocacy organization aiming to fill gaps in COVID-19 guidance left by the official CDC, has published a toolkit focused on school safety for the fall. The presentation walks readers through why public health measures are still needed in K-12 schools and potential layers of protection, such as improved ventilation, surveillance testing, and improving pediatric vaccination rates.
    • Parents and caregivers lost to COVID-19: Speaking of protecting children, a new study published in JAMA Pediatrics this week estimates how many children have lost parents or caregivers during the pandemic. The researchers (an international group including experts at the World Health Organization, World Health Organization, and others) produced their estimates based on global excess mortality data—going beyond deaths officially reported as COVID-19. In total, the study estimates about 10.5 million lost parents or caregivers and 7.5 million became orphans worldwide.
    • True virus prevalence during the BA.5 surge: I’ve previously cited the work of Denis Nash and his team at the City University of New York; they utilized a population survey to estimate how many New Yorkers actually got COVID-19 during the city’s spring surge. This week, the team shared a new study that uses the same approach for the whole country. While their sample size was fairly small (about 3,000 people) and the study has yet to be peer-reviewed, its findings are striking: about 17% of U.S. adults surveyed were infected by the coronavirus during a two-week period from late June to early July, around the peak of the BA.5 surge.
    • New independent effort to study Long COVID: This week, a group of researchers, clinicians, and patients announced the Long Covid Research Initiative, a new collaborative effort to study the condition and identify potential treatments. The group has raised $15 million in private funding and aims to move more quickly than public or academic efforts that have been bogged down in bureaucracy (among other challenges). I’m excited to see what this new group finds.

    All featured sources

  • Sources and updates, June 12

    • CDC investigating deaths from Long COVID: Researchers at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics are currently working to investigate potential deaths from Long COVID, according to a report from POLITICO. The researchers are reviewing death certificates from 2020 and 2021, looking for causes of death that may indicate a patient died from Long COVID symptoms rather than during the acute stage of the disease. There’s currently no death code associated with Long COVID and diagnoses can be highly variable, so the work is preliminary, but I’m really looking forward to seeing their results.
    • CDC reports on ventilation improvements in schools: And one notable CDC study that was published this week: researchers at the agency from COVID-19, occupational health, and other teams analyzed what K-12 public schools are doing to improve their ventilation. The report is based on a survey of 420 public schools in all 50 states and D.C., with results weighted to best represent all schools across the country. While a majority of schools have taken some measures to inspect their HVAC systems or increase ventilation by opening windows, holding activities outside, etc., only 39% of schools surveyed had actually replaced or upgraded their HVAC systems. A lot more work is needed in this area.
    • Results from the COVID-19 U.S. State Policy database: The Boston University team behind the COVID-19 U.S. State Policy database has published a paper in BMC Public Health sharing major findings from their work. The database (which I’ve shared in the CDD before) documents what states have done to curb COVID-19 spread and address economic hardship during the pandemic, as well as how states report COVID-19 data.  In their new paper, the BU team explains how this database may be used to analyze the impacts of these policy measures on public health.
    • Promising news about Moderna’s bivalent vaccine: Moderna, like other vaccine companies, has been working on versions of its COVID-19 vaccine that can protect better against new variants like Omicron. This week, the company announced results (in a press release, as usual) from a trial of a bivalent vaccine, which includes both genetic elements of the original SARS-CoV-2 virus and of Omicron. The bivalent vaccine works much better than Moderna’s original vaccine at protecting against Omicron infection, Moderna said; still, scientists are skeptical about how the vaccine may fare against newer subvariants (BA.2.12.1, BA.4, BA.5).
    • Call center and survey from FYLPRO: A reader who works at the Filipino Young Leaders Program (FYLPRO) requested that I share two resources from their organization. First, the program has set up a call center aimed at helping vulnerable community members with their COVID-19 questions. The call center is available on weekdays from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. Pacific time in both English and Tagalog; while it’s geared towards the Filipino community, anyone can call in. And second, FYLPRO has launched a nationwide survey to study vaccine attitudes among Filipinos; learn more about it here.

    All featured sources
  • COVID-19 in schools data: still bad!

    COVID-19 in schools data: still bad!

    Screenshot of Burbio’s K-12 School Opening Tracker, taken on March 27.

    In addition to the FiveThirtyEight story, I also had an article come out this week in The Grade, Alexander Russo’s column at KappanOnline. This piece takes a deep dive into Burbio, the company that has become a leading source for data on how COVID-19 impacted K-12 schools across the U.S—in the absence of comprehensive data on this topic from the federal government.

    Burbio is pretty popular among education journalists, I learned in writing this story. Dennis Roche, one of the company’s founders, writes a weekly newsletter providing updates on COVID-19 in schools, and often makes himself available to answer reporters’ questions. Burbio has also become a major data source for the CDC, to the point that the agency provided Burbio with a $600,000 grant for its tracking efforts in the 2021-22 school year.

    However, in the story, I discuss several red flags that stood out to me as a science, health, and data journalist. These include:

    The company does not clearly disclose its dataset’s limitations, nor does it disclose its funding sources. Its data are not publicly available for researchers to vet. The popular data on school “disruptions” are easy to misinterpret when cited without context.

    Journalists citing Burbio should be clear about the data source’s limitations, I wrote. And they should also consider alternative sources; while Burbio filled a void by the federal government, it’s not the only source doing this work. The story highlights several potential options: MCH Strategic Data, the American Enterprise Institute’s Return to Learn tracker, a scientific researcher’s dataset, and an HHS dashboard that compiles data from multiple sources (including Burbio).

    Notably, Burbio did not even attempt to track COVID-19 cases in schools, opting instead to focus on learning modes and safety policies. A couple of research projects did track school cases in the 2020-21 school year, but this specific metric is now primarily tracked by state health departments with no comprehensive federal source. (The COVID School Tracker, one volunteer-run site that is still actively updating, compiles data from states.)

    To see what school COVID-19 case data each state is reporting, you can check out my annotations page here; I updated the annotations of both state and national sources yesterday.

    Some states are now reducing their reporting in this area, aligning with the overall recent trend of cutting back on COVID-19 data at the state level.  A couple of notable examples:

    • Indiana switched from reporting school-specific cases to reporting school-aged cases (i.e. all cases in children ages 5 to 18 or so). Reporting school-aged cases is often easier for a health department, since it doesn’t require contact tracing cases to classrooms.
    • Ohio stopped its reporting of COVID-19 cases in schools entirely. As of mid-March, schools in Ohio are no longer required to report most COVID-19 cases among students and staff to their local health departments, according to local news site Spectrum News 1 in Columbus. (The exception is cases identified by COVID-19 testing within schools.)
    • Vermont also stopped its reporting of COVID-19 cases in schools. A note on the state’s “PreK-12 Schools” page reads: “Due to changes in testing and contact tracing in schools, the COVID-19 Cases in Schools While Infectious report will no longer be updated after Jan. 10, 2022.

    More K-12 schools data

  • Sources and updates, March 13

    A couple of data sources, and a few data-related news items:

    • COVID-19 vaccine data annotations: Yesterday, I updated my annotations page on U.S. vaccination data sources for the first time in a few weeks. The page lists both national dashboards and vaccine data pages from all 50 state public health agencies, including notes on what each source offers. Going through the dashboards yesterday, I was struck by how many states are now offering data on booster shots (43, by my count), as well as how counts of doses distributed in a state, once a major feature of these dashboards, have become less useful now that the U.S. has ample vaccine supplies.
    • Order more free rapid tests from the federal government: The COVIDtests.gov site is now open for additional orders of free rapid at-home tests, as part of the federal program that launched in mid-January. Each household can now order two sets of four tests. I ordered a set of tests last Monday, and received them on Thursday—much faster than the initial round of this program!
    • Scientists are investigating combinations of Delta and Omicron: You might have seen some recent headlines about “Deltacron,” a portmanteau of the two variants of concern. When a very unlucky person gets infected with both Delta and Omicron at the same time, the variants can combine and form a new strain with genetic elements of both lineages. Scientists have recently identified a small number of “Deltacron” cases in France, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the U.S.; it’s not cause for major concern at this time, but is under study to determine if this combined strain might have any transmission or severity advantages. The Guardian has a good explainer on the subject.
    https://twitter.com/PeacockFlu/status/1502726359096909825
    • New studies on masks, vaccines for kids: This week, the CDC MMWR published a new study on masking in K-12 schools; the researchers found that Arkansas school districts with a universal mask requirement in the fall 2021 semester had 23% lower cases than schools that did not have a requirement. The journal also published a new study on vaccinations in children ages 5 to 11; this study found that, within three months of COVID-19 vaccines becoming available for this age group, 92% of kids ages 5 to 11 lived within 5 miles of a vaccine provider. However, vaccination coverage in this age group is low, suggesting the need for more targeted communication to families with young kids.
    • NIH starts new trial on allergic reactions to vaccines: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently announced a new clinical trial to understand “rare but potentially serious systemic allergic reactions” to the COVID-19 vaccines. The trial will include up to 100 people between the ages of 16 and 69 who had allergic reactions to their first vaccine doses; the NIH will provide second doses under heavily monitored conditions and study how these patients respond.
    • How to better recruit for COVID-19 trials: Speaking of clinical trials, a new preprint posted this week to medRxiv outlines a potential strategy for better studying effectiveness and potential rare side effects of COVID-19 treatments. The preprint authors propose targeting recruitment to people who are high-risk for coronavirus infection, so that studies may collect data on a statistically significant number of cases more quickly.
    • COVID-19 at the Tokyo Olympics: Another study that caught my eye this week: researchers from Tokyo described the results of intensive surveillance testing for athletes who competed in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. In total, among over one million PCR tests conducted before and during the Olympic games, just 299 returned positive results—a positivity rate of 0.03%.
    • COVID-19 on Capitol Hill: Reporters at The Hill analyzed data on COVID-19 test results among House and Senate lawmakers, finding that more than one-quarter have tested positive since the pandemic began. The highest case numbers occurred in January 2022 during the Omicron wave, aligning with the U.S. overall. (Though I imagine many legislators travel and socialize indoors more than the average American.)

    All featured sources
  • Why Utah’s innovative school COVID-19 testing program failed

    Why Utah’s innovative school COVID-19 testing program failed

    In fall 2021, testing events at Utah public schools failed to decrease coronavirus transmission.

    My latest story with the Documenting COVID-19 project is an investigation into Utah’s school COVID-19 testing program, in collaboration with the Salt Lake Tribune.

    As longtime readers know, I have done a lot of reporting on school COVID-19 testing programs. I find these efforts to routinely test K-12 students fascinating, in part because of the unique potential for collaboration between school districts, health departments, and other community institutions—and also because of the immense challenges that arise when schools are asked to become health providers in a way we never would’ve considered before the pandemic.

    Utah’s program caught my eye last year when I was reporting a story for Science News on the hurdles schools faced in setting up COVID-19 testing. This state was an early pioneer of Test to Stay, a strategy in which students must test negative to attend school after a potential exposure rather than going through a (potentially unnecessary) quarantine.

    In Utah’s version of Test to Stay, once 1% of students tested positive for the virus, the entire school would go through a testing event. Students who tested negative could keep attending school without interruption, while those who tested positive (or those who refused to participate) could quarantine. The Utah health department tested out this program in the 2020-2021 school year, and it was so successful that a CDC MMWR boasted it had “saved over 100,000 days of in-person instruction.”

    After that successful test, Utah’s state legislature codified the program into law for the 2021-2022 school year. But Test to Stay crashed and burned this past fall, even before the Omicron variant overwhelmed Utah’s test supplies.

    Here’s why the program failed, according to our investigation:

    • When putting Test to Stay into law, the Utah state legislature doubled the threshold for school cases that would trigger a testing event, from 1% to 2% of the student body. (Or from 15 to 30 students at smaller schools with under 1,500 students.) This higher threshold allowed COVID-19 to spread more widely before testing events took place, leading to higher case numbers when students were finally tested.
    • Utah’s lawmakers also banned schools from requiring masks in fall 2021, leading to more transmission. Experts said the original program was intended to be paired with masks and other safety measures; it was not able to stand on its own.
    • In the 2020-2021 school year, Test to Stay was paired with a second program called Test to Play: mandatory testing every two weeks for students on sports teams and in other extracurriculars. Without this regular testing in fall 2021, Utah schools had less capacity to identify school cases outside of voluntary and symptomatic tests—so it took longer for schools to reach the Test to Stay threshold.
    • The Utah health department allowed individual schools and districts to request rapid tests for additional surveillance testing. Some administrators requested thousands of tests and made them regularly available to students and staff; others were entirely uninterested and did not encourage testing at their schools.
    • Testing in schools has become increasingly polarized in recent months, like all other COVID-19 safety measures. One school administrator told me that he faced some vocal parents who felt “that their rights were being trampled on” by the testing program. Without high numbers of students opting in to get tested, testing programs are inherently less successful.

    Even though the CDC endorsed Test to Stay as part of its official school COVID-19 guidance last December—citing Utah’s program as a key example—its future in the state is now uncertain. State lawmakers paused the program during the Omicron surge in January and have yet to revive it. At the same time, lawmakers have made it even harder for Utah schools to make their own decisions around safety measures.

    What school districts and health departments should actually be doing, experts told me, is stock up on rapid tests now so that they’re ready to do mass testing in future surges. It’s unlikely that the Omicron wave will be our last, much as some Utah Republicans might want to pretend that’s the case.

    You can read my full story at MuckRock’s site here (in a slightly longer version) or at the Salt Lake Tribune here (in a slightly shorter version). And the documents underlying this investigation are available on the Documenting COVID-19 site here.

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